James Chan

Two and half hours from Wenzhou to Beijing, and now I stuck at Beijing Capital International Airport waiting for the transit flight. Everything was going smoothly, from check-in to boarding the flight. It is the waiting that is painful especially when you have to spend 4 hours or so and there is nothing much you can do.

My next stop is Dubai, I have never been to Dubai before, well, I spent few hours at the Dubai International Airport during my last trip to middle east. Tell you what, I will have to spend 10 hours waiting for the return flight. God knows how I am gonna kill this amount of time then.

April 22 to 24, Dubai

April 24 to 29, Iran (Tehran and Isfahan)

It is long trip this time, from start to finish, it is 9 days. Almost half of the time will be wasted on the airplane or cars. When I come back to China, I will go to Hunan with 1 day rest to attend Sophia’s wedding.

What an arrangement! I hope it is fruitful with the negotiation this time.

I have been watching ABC World News with Diane Sawyer, and it was quite good to know what goes on around the world, I love the podcast, but sadly the “final pod cast” was released on April 7th reported David Muir. He only said the video podcast was no longer available in iTunes but full episodes are available on ABC website.  However he did not explain the reason. Is Apple kicking it out of podcast category or what? I am wondering and quite eager to know.There’s got be some explanation.

Just read about this piece, figured forwarding it to share something extraordinary with you.

I am telling you a story now, event occurs at some rural town at Russian border. A guy brings in to a repair shop a 500G portable drive that he claimed faulty. He bought it in a Chinese shop on the other side of the river with unbelievably amazing good deal. However, he can only play for the last 5 minutes or so of a movie that he just copied in.  That is very strange, right? It reads 500G and yet only 5 minutes of a movie can be played.

Everything else works fine, with the strange problem, they tear it down and guess what, check out the photos below for yourself. OMG, I couldn’t close my mouth for a while.

Source: mydrivers.com

The 2 nuts were added to compensate the weight to make it more real as a portable drive. The USB drive is only 128MB, however it works like it has endless capacity under “looped” mode, which I just know about. Under “looped” mode, the system erases the old data to free space for new data coping in.

This is amazing, some people can make a fortune out of it. Pay attention do not be fooled next time when you buy a portable drive. Still again, I want to say, magical things can happen in China. It is MIRACLE!

Today the Apple Online Store is temporarily unavailable, it says updating. Wondering what they are updating this time? They are preparing for something for sure but what is that? New iPod Touch, iPhone? Let’s wait and see.

Video from Youku www.youku.com

It is truly touching, I was tearing when watching it. I am sure you are too. Heaven’s Lunch is a short-film directed by a never-heard-of Chinese director Liu Xiaoyu, it is only 6-minute long but it feels like life long.

The movie is telling us that parents never stop loving us, caring about us. You must take quick action to love back and start caring about them before it is too late. “Don’t wait for pain to love a person.”, in plain words, it is that you must not wait to make your mom/dad a dinner or something, it will be too late until you realize that someone is gone forever. If you are a spoiled child, it is still not late to change you behavior and start loving your parents. For those of us who haven’t even made a dinner for them, time to do it now.

I wish Chinese directors, especially those so-called well-known directors, made more movies of this kind. I know that there are many western movies about parents and family, which by the way is that reason I like them, but they should be ashamed when seeing this. This is a fine piece of art, I recommend it to you.

Friendly warning: before you view this, make sure you are 18+,  especially if you are a girl.  Got this vid from Tudou, naked men putting up a show, see how astonishing it is and interesting. Some girls feel awkward, some are enjoying the moment of the show.

Are you enjoying it? haha…

From Tudou, www.tudou.com

On March 2, 2011, Apple revealed its 2nd generation of iPad – iPad 2. I received an email from Apple that introduce very briefly “Thinner. Lighter. Faster. FaceTime. Smart Covers. 10-hour battery. Coming March 11. Starting at $499.”. Wow $499, still the same price as predecessor.

iPad 2

I liked the first generation of iPad, in fact, I like Apple products, well most of them. It turned out that iPad was not suitable for me after playing it around few times, of course it was in the Apple Store and from my friends. First of all it was too heavy, after I held it for like 10 minutes, my hands felt tired. If you use it as a tablet, then it is the best, but it is like a hand held device. Secondly the apps are costly if you really into using it. Say like you buy 10 apps, $1 each, you would have to spend $10. It is that simple, money. However, you do have the chance to jailbreak it which is not legit. For me, I don’t want to do it.

iPad Smart Cover

However, iPad and iPad 2 does have lots of goodies in it. For example, with iPad 2, it is a thin light tablet computer running iOS to replace your PC which is a lot better. In addition, you have the chance to use FaceTime, it is especially good for conference call (does it support multiple people in FaceTime? Just wondering).

One thing must be mentioned though is the Smart Cover, actually nothing attracted me until I saw this little ad that was played during the keynote. I think this is very creative. Steve was right, the traditional cover did waster the design. I will give 10 out of 10 for the idea. Of course it looks good, at least in the video.

I might consider buying one iPad 2, who knows. To follow the trend.

One of my friends came to me and showed me that Wi-Fi of his iPad  was not functional, in Settings, the Wi-Fi was grayed out, it reads “No Wi-Fi”. Also the Bluetooth was unavailable and grayed out too, go to General – About, the Bluetooth address showed 00:00:00:00:00,  I could not do anything but to restore iOS.

First I connected it to PC to do restore, it took a while to restore in iTunes, but it was completed successfully. However, checking it again, the option was still grayed out. I was suspecting computer system problems, and I switched to my MacBook and did the restore again, the issue remained. I started to think it was hardware problem, but I was not convinced by that.

Again, I went to Dev Team and got the latest jailbreak tool, yes you were right, I would jailbreak it. With the hope of correcting it by jailbreaking, I downloaded iOS 4.2.1 ipsw and ran the tool. Following the instructions, I managed to complete the jailbreaking process. Nothing happened except a Cydia icon was added. I ran Cydia and it did not work without network connection.

Everything I tried was in vein now, it was confirmed by me that it was faulty hardware, maybe. At last, I just told my friend to go to Apple Store and get a genius to fix it or replace it.

p.s. : I had tried googling it, but nothing much came up. Should any of you have similar problem, or you’ve managed to fix it, please comment. Let’s spread it out.

I recently bought the Apple Airport Express after reading numerous comments about it. It looked very nice when I got it, well, Apple’s products are always attractive in design, that is the reason I like them. I tested in my office and it was fine to join and extending current wireless network. I went home and I hooked it up to the LAN and the power speaker I bought not long ago.  I tried to use the utility to scan and it could not be discovered. It took me 2 hours to finally got it work.  I realized that something was wrong with the setting I did earlier, and not the new firmware that was widely commented as the cause.
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